Scott Lowe

Author Archives: Scott Lowe

Review: Anker PowerExpand Elite Thunderbolt 3 Dock

Over the last couple of weeks or so, I’ve been using my 2017 MacBook Pro (running macOS “Mojave” 10.14.6) more frequently as my daily driver/primary workstation. Along with it, I’ve been using the Anker PowerExpand Elite 13-in-1 Thunderbolt 3 Dock. In this post, I’d like to share my experience with this dock and provide a quick review of the Anker PowerExpand Elite.

Note that I’m posting this as a customer of Anker. I paid for the PowerExpand Elite out of my own pocket, and haven’t received any compensation of any kind from anyone in return for my review. This is just me sharing my experience in the event it will help others.

First Impressions

The dock is both smaller than I expected (it measures 5 inches by 3.5 inches by 1.5 inches) and yet heavier than I expected. It feels solid and well-built. It comes with a (rather large) power brick and a Thunderbolt 3 cable to connect to the MacBook Pro. Setup was insanely easy; plug it in, connect it to the laptop, and you’re off to the races. (I did need to reboot my MacBook Pro for macOS to recognize the network interface in Continue reading

Technology Short Take 129

Welcome to Technology Short Take #129, where I’ve collected a bunch of links and references to technology-centric resources around the Internet. This collection is (mostly) data center- and cloud-focused, and hopefully I’ve managed to curate a list that has some useful information for readers. Sorry this got published so late; it was supposed to go live this morning!

Note there is a slight format change debuting in this Tech Short Take. Moving forward, I won’t include sections where I have no content to share, and I’ll add sections for content that may not typically appear. This will make the list of sections a bit more dynamic between Tech Short Takes. Let me know if you like this new approach—feel free to contact me on Twitter and provide your feedback.

Now, on to the good stuff!

Networking

Working Around Docker Desktop’s Outdated Kubernetes Version

As of the time that I published this blog post in early July 2020, Docker Desktop for macOS was at version 2.2.0.4 (for the “stable” channel). That version includes a relatively recent version of the Docker engine (19.03.8, compared to 19.03.12 on my Fedora 31 box), but a quite outdated version of Kubernetes (1.15.5, which isn’t supported by upstream). Now, this may not be a problem for users who only use Kubernetes via Docker Desktop. For me, however, the old version of Kubernetes—specifically the old version of kubectl—causes problems. Here’s how I worked around the old version that Docker Desktop supplies.

First, you’ll note that Docker Desktop automatically symlinks its version of kubectl into your system path at /usr/local/bin. You can verify the version of Docker Desktop’s kubectl by running this command:

/usr/local/bin/kubectl version --client=true

On my macOS 10.14.6-based system, this returned a version of 1.15.5. According to GitHub, v1.15.5 was released in October of 2019. Per the Kubernetes version skew policy, this version of kubectl would work with with 1.14, 1.15, and 1.16. What if I need to Continue reading

Creating an AWS Security Group using Pulumi and Go

In this post, I’m going to share some examples of how to create an AWS security group using Pulumi and Go. I’m sharing these examples because—as of this writing—the Pulumi site does not provide any examples on how this is done using Go. There are examples for the other languages supported by Pulumi, but not for Go. The syntax is, to me at least, somewhat counterintuitive, although I freely admit this could be due to the fact that I am still pretty new to Go and its syntax.

As a framework for providing these examples, I’ll use the scenario that I need to create two different security groups. The first security group will allow SSH traffic from the Internet to designated bastion hosts. The second security group will need to allow SSH from those bastion hosts, as well as allow all traffic between/among members of the security group. Between these two groups, I should be able to show enough examples to cover most of the different use cases you’ll run into.

Although no example was present for Go when I wrote this article, readers may still find the API reference for the SecurityGroup resource to be useful nevertheless.

First, let’s Continue reading

Adopting the Default Route Table of an AWS VPC using Pulumi and Go

Up until now, when I used Pulumi to create infrastructure on AWS, my code would create all-new infrastructure: a new VPC, new subnets, new route tables, new Internet gateway, etc. One thing bothered me, though: when I created a new VPC, that new VPC automatically came with a default route table. My code, however, would create a new route table and then explicitly associate the subnets with that new route table. This seemed less than ideal. (What can I say? I’m a stickler for details.) While building a Go-based replacement for my existing TypeScript code, I found a way to resolve this duplication of resources. In this post, I’ll show you how to “adopt” the default route table of an AWS VPC so that you can manage it in your Pulumi code.

Let’s assume you are creating a new VPC using code that looks something like this:

vpc, err := ec2.NewVpc(ctx, "testvpc", &ec2.VpcArgs{
	CidrBlock: pulumi.String("10.100.0.0/16"),
	Tags: pulumi.Map {
		"Name": pulumi.String("testvpc"),
		k8sTag: pulumi.String("shared"),
	},
})

(Note that this snippet of code doesn’t show anything happening with the return values of the ec2.NewVpc function, which Go will complain about. Make Continue reading

Getting AWS Availability Zones using Pulumi and Go

I’ve written several different articles on Pulumi (take a look at all articles tagged “Pulumi”), the infrastructure-as-code tool that allows users to define their infrastructure using a general-purpose programming language instead of a domain-specific language (DSL). Thus far, my work with Pulumi has leveraged TypeScript, but moving forward I’m going to start sharing more Pulumi code written using Go. In this post, I’ll share how to use Pulumi and Go to get a list of Availability Zones (AZs) from a particular region in AWS.

Before I proceed, I feel like it is important to provide the disclaimer that I’m new to Go (and therefore still learning). There are probably better ways of doing what I’m doing here, and so I welcome all constructive feedback on how I can improve.

With that disclaimer out of the way, allow me to first provide a small bit of context around this code. When I’m using Pulumi to manage infrastructure on AWS, I like to try to keep things as region-independent as possible. Therefore, I try to avoid hard-coding things like the number of AZs or the AZ names, and prefer to gather that information dynamically—which is what this code does.

Here’s the Continue reading

Fixes for Some Vagrant Issues on Fedora

Yesterday I needed to perform some testing of an updated version of some software that I use. (I was conducting the testing because this upgrade contained some breaking changes, and needed to understand how to mitigate the breaking changes.) So, I broke out Vagrant (with the Libvirt provider) on my Fedora laptop—and promptly ran into a couple issues. Fortunately, these issues were relatively easy to work around, but since the workarounds were non-intuitive I wanted to share them here for the benefit of others.

If you’re unfamiliar with Vagrant, have a look at my quick introduction to Vagrant. The “TL;DR” is the Vagrant can offer users a consistent workflow to creating and destroying VMs across a fairly wide number of platforms, including both local providers (like VirtualBox or VMware Fusion/VMware Workstation) and cloud provider (such as AWS and Azure). I’ve written a fair amount on Vagrant, so feel free to browse all the “Vagrant”-tagged posts on the site for more information.

Likewise, if you’re unfamiliar with the Libvirt provider, check out this post from 2017 on using Vagrant with Libvirt on Fedora 27.

In my testing yesterday, I ran into two networking-related issues. The first of them was Continue reading

Technology Short Take 128

Welcome to Technology Short Take #128! It looks like I’m settling into a roughly monthly cadence with the Technology Short Takes. This time around, I’ve got a (hopefully) interesting collection of links. The collection seems a tad heavier than normal in the hardware and security sections, probably due to new exploits discovered in Intel’s speculative execution functionality. In any case, here’s what I’ve gathered for you. Enjoy!

Networking

Servers/Hardware

  • This article from Carlos Fenollosa talks about his experience with a new 2020 MacBook Pro compared to his 2013-era MacBook Air. While there is some Continue reading

Using kubectl via an SSH Tunnel

In this post, I’d like to share one way (not the only way!) to use kubectl to access your Kubernetes cluster via an SSH tunnel. In the future, I may explore some other ways (hit me on Twitter if you’re interested). I’m sharing this information because I suspect it is not uncommon for folks deploying Kubernetes on the public cloud to want to deploy them in a way that does not expose them to the Internet. Given that the use of SSH bastion hosts is not uncommon, it seemed reasonable to show how one could use an SSH tunnel to reach a Kubernetes cluster behind an SSH bastion host.

If you’re unfamiliar with SSH bastion hosts, see this post for an overview.

To use kubectl via an SSH tunnel through a bastion host to a Kubernetes cluster, there are two steps required:

  1. The Kubernetes API server needs an appropriate Subject Alternative Name (SAN) on its certificate.
  2. The Kubeconfig file needs to be updated to reflect the tunnel details.

Ensuring an Appropriate SAN for the API Server

As is the case with just about any TLS-secured connection, if the destination to which you’re connecting with kubectl doesn’t match any of Continue reading

Making it Easier to Get Started with Cluster API on AWS

I’ve written a few articles about Cluster API (you can see a list of the articles here), but even though I strive to make my articles easy to understand and easy to follow along many of those articles make an implicit assumption: that readers are perhaps already somewhat familiar with Linux, Docker, tools like kind, and perhaps even Kubernetes. Today I was thinking, “What about folks who are new to this? What can I do to make it easier?” In this post, I’ll talk about the first idea I had: creating a “bootstrapper” AMI that enables new users to quickly and easily jump into the Cluster API Quick Start.

Normally, in order to use the Quick Start, there are some prerequisites that are needed first (these are all clearly listed on the Quick Start page):

  • You need kubectl installed
  • You need kind (which in turn requires Docker) or an existing Kubernetes cluster up and running

For Linux users (like myself), these prerequisites are pretty easy/simple to handle. But what if you’re a Windows or Mac user? Yes, you could use Docker Desktop and then install kind (or use docker-machine, if you’re feeling adventurous). Then you’d Continue reading

Creating a Multi-AZ NAT Gateway with Pulumi

I recently had a need to test a configuration involving the use of a single NAT Gateway servicing multiple private subnets across multiple availability zones (AZs) within a single VPC. While there are notable caveats with such a design (see the “Caveats” section at the bottom of this article), it could make sense in some use cases. In this post, I’ll show you how I used TypeScript with Pulumi to automate the creation of this design.

For the most part, if you’re familiar with Pulumi and using TypeScript with Pulumi, this will be pretty straightforward. The code I’ll show you makes a couple assumptions:

  1. It assumes you’ve already created the VPC and the subnets earlier in the code. I’ll reference the VPC object as vpc.
  2. I’ll assume you’ve already created subnets in said VPC, and that the subnet-to-AZ ratio is 1:1 (exactly one subnet of each type—public or private—in each AZ). The code will reference the subnet IDs as pubSubnetIds (for public subnets) or privSubnetIds (for private subnets). (How to create the subnets and capture the list of IDs is left as an exercise for the reader. If you’d be interested in seeing how I do it, let me know. Continue reading

Review: Magic Mouse 2 and Magic Trackpad 2 on Fedora

I recently purchased a new Apple Magic Mouse 2 and an Apple Magic Trackpad 2—not to use with my MacBook Pro, but to use with my Fedora-powered laptop (a Lenovo 5th generation ThinkPad X1 Carbon; see my review). I know it seems odd to buy Apple accessories for a non-Apple laptop, and in this post I’d like to talk about why I bought these items as well as provide some (relatively early) feedback on how well they work with Fedora.

The Justification/Background

First, let me talk about the why behind my purchase of these items. Several years ago, I started simultaneously using both an external trackpad/touchpad and an external mouse with my macOS-based home office setup. I realize this is probably odd, but I adopted the practice as a way of eliminating “mouse finger” on my right hand. With this arrangement, I stopped trying to scroll with my right-hand (either using a mouse wheel with older mice or using the scroll-enabled back of the Magic Mouse), and instead shifting scrolling to my left hand (using two-finger scrolling on the trackpad). This “division of labor” worked well. Because my existing Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad—both earlier generations—don’t work with Continue reading

Using Unison Across Linux, macOS, and Windows

I recently wrapped up an instance where I needed to use the Unison file synchronization application across Linux, macOS, and Windows. While Unison is available for all three platforms and does work across (and among) systems running all three operating systems, I did encounter a few interoperability issues while making it work. Here’s some information on these interoperability issues, and how I worked around them. (Hopefully this information will help someone else.)

The use case here is to keep a subset of directories in sync between a MacBook Air running macOS “Catalina” 10.15.5 and a Surface Pro 6 running Windows 10. A system running Ubuntu 18.04.4 acted as the “server”; each “client” system (the MacBook Air and the Surface Pro) would synchronize with the Ubuntu system. I’ve used a nearly-identical setup for several years to keep my systems synchronized.

One thing to know about Unison before I continue is that you need compatible versions of Unison on both systems in order for it to work. As I understand it, compatibility is not just based on version numbers, but also on the Ocaml version with which it was compiled.

With that in mind, I already had Continue reading

Technology Short Take 127

Welcome to Technology Short Take #127! Let’s see what I’ve managed to collect for you this time around…

Networking

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time around, but I’ll stay alert for items to include next time!

Security

Cloud Continue reading

Technology Short Take 126

Welcome to Technology Short Take #126! I meant to get this published last Friday, but completely forgot. So, I added a couple more links and instead have it ready for you today. I don’t have any links for servers/hardware or security in today’s Short Take, but hopefully there’s enough linked content in the other sections that you’ll still find something useful. Enjoy!

Networking

Servers/Hardware

Nothing this time around!

Security

I don’t have anything to include this time, but I’ll stay alert for content I can Continue reading

Setting up etcd with etcdadm

I’ve written a few different posts on setting up etcd. There’s this one on bootstrapping a TLS-secured etcd cluster with kubeadm, and there’s this one about using kubeadm to run an etcd cluster as static Pods. There’s also this one about using kubeadm to run etcd with containerd. In this article, I’ll provide yet another way of setting up a “best practices” etcd cluster, this time using a tool named etcdadm.

etcdadm is an open source project, originally started by Platform9 (here’s the blog post announcing the project being open sourced). As the README in the GitHub repository mentions, the user experience for etcdadm “is inspired by kubeadm.”

Getting etcdadm

The instructions in the repository indicate that you can use go get -u sigs.k8s.io/etcdadm, but I ran into problems with that approach (using Go 1.14). At the suggestion of the one of the maintainers, I also tried Go 1.12, but it failed both on my main Ubuntu laptop as well as on a clean Ubuntu VM. However, running make etcdadm in a clone of the repository worked, and one of the maintainers indicated the documentation will be updated to reflect this approach Continue reading

Using External Etcd with Cluster API on AWS

If you’ve used Cluster API (CAPI), you may have noticed that workload clusters created by CAPI use, by default, a “stacked master” configuration—that is, the etcd cluster is running co-located on the control plane node(s) alongside the Kubernetes control plane components. This is a very common configuration and is well-suited for most deployments, so it makes perfect sense that this is the default. There may be cases, however, where you’ll want to use a dedicated, external etcd cluster for your Kubernetes clusters. In this post, I’ll show you how to use an external etcd cluster with CAPI on AWS.

The information in this blog post is based on this upstream document. I’ll be adding a little bit of AWS-specific information, since I primarily use the AWS provider for CAPI. This post is written with CAPI v1alpha3 in mind.

The key to this solution is building upon the fact that CAPI leverages kubeadm for bootstrapping cluster nodes. This puts the full power of the kubeadm API at your fingertips—which in turn means you have a great deal of flexibility. This is the mechanism whereby you can tell CAPI to use an external etcd cluster instead of creating a co-located etcd Continue reading

Using Existing AWS Security Groups with Cluster API

I’ve written before about how to use existing AWS infrastructure with Cluster API (CAPI), and I was recently able to help update the upstream documentation on this topic (the upstream documentation should now be considered the authoritative source). These instructions are perfect for placing a Kubernetes cluster into an existing VPC and associated subnets, but there’s one scenario that they don’t yet address: what if you need your CAPI workload cluster to be able to communicate with other EC2 instances or other AWS services in the same VPC? In this post, I’ll show you the CAPI functionality that makes this possible.

One of the primary mechanisms used in AWS to control communications among instances and services is the security group. I won’t go into any detail on security groups, but this page from AWS provides an explanation and overview of how security groups work.

In order to make a CAPI workload cluster able to communicate with other EC2 instances or other AWS services, you’ll need to somehow use security groups to make that happen. There are at least two—possibly more—ways to accomplish this:

  1. You could add other instances or services to the CAPI-created security groups. The Cluster API Provider Continue reading

Using Paw to Launch an EC2 Instance via API Calls

Last week I wrote a post on using Postman to launch an EC2 instance via API calls. Postman is a cross-platform application, so while my post was centered around Postman on Linux (Ubuntu, specifically) the steps should be very similar—if not exactly the same—when using Postman on other platforms. Users of macOS, however, have another option: a macOS-specific peer to Postman named Paw. In this post, I’ll walk through using Paw to issue API requests to AWS to launch an EC2 instance.

I’ll structure this post as a “diff,” if you will, that outlines the differences of using Paw to launch an EC2 instance via API calls versus using Postman to do the same thing. Therefore, if you haven’t already read the Postman post from last week, I strongly recommend reviewing it before proceeding.

Prerequisites

This post assumes you’ve already installed Paw on your macOS system. It also assumes you are somewhat familiar with Paw; refer to the Paw documentation if not. Also, to support AWS authentication, please be sure to install the “AWS Signature 4 Auth Dynamic value” extension (see here or here). This extension is necessary in order to have the API requests sent Continue reading

Using Postman to Launch an EC2 Instance via API Calls

As I mentioned in this post on region and endpoint match in AWS API requests, exploring the AWS APIs is something I’ve been doing off and on for several months. There’s a couple reasons for this; I’ll go into those in a bit more detail shortly. In any case, I’ve been exploring the APIs using Postman (when on Linux) and Paw (when on macOS), and in this post I’ll share how to use Postman to launch an EC2 instance via API calls.

Before I get into the technical details, let me lay out a couple reasons for spending some time on this. I’m pretty familiar with tools like Terraform and Pulumi (my current favorite), and I’m reasonably familiar with AWS CLI itself. In looking at working directly with the APIs, I see this as adding a new perspective on how these other tools work. (I’ve found, in fact, that exploring the APIs has improved my usage of the AWS CLI.) Finally, as I try to deepen my knowledge of programming languages, I wanted to have a reasonable knowledge of the APIs before trying to program around the APIs (hopefully this will make the learning curve a bit less Continue reading

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